


where the runaways are

by akaiiko



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - Circus, Angst with a Happy Ending, Beauty and the Beast Elements, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Fairy Tale Curses, M/M, Mentions of Period Typical -isms, Mutual Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2020-04-12 11:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19131328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaiiko/pseuds/akaiiko
Summary: If Shiro gives his heart away, he'll lose his soul.“Do you believe in fairytales?”It’s an absurd question for people like them. People who live on whatever tattered edges of fairytales still exist in the world.Shiro curls his fingers in the soft hair at the nape of Keith’s neck and tugs it gently. He doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t want to look around the wagon that’s bigger on the inside and filled with lions whose souls rub against his own and a boy who maybe can fly. Those things belong in fairytales. If he looks at them, he won’t be able to answer true and say, “No.”That nets him a long pause. All the longer because Keith stops breathing. Shifts against him, half lifting his head and causing Shiro’s fingers to slip through his hair. “Why not?” Absurdly, Keith sounds almost offended. Like it’s a personal affront against him, specifically, that Shiro doesn’t believe in fairytales. “We’re surrounded by magic day in and day out. Allura’s part faerie. You’recursed.”“Fairytales aren’t magic,” Shiro says. He knows this down to his bones. It doesn’t matter if his curse echoes stories he heard before. “They’re something else.”





	where the runaways are

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onehornyunicorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onehornyunicorn/gifts).



> a late start to a late birthday present for my darling uni, who deserves all the fairytales both above and below for the shenanigans he tolerates & encourages from me. this one's for you babes.

Shiro loses almost everything in the war.

Here’s the tally: his arm, his unmarked face, his soldiers, his jiji, his friends, his home, his citizenship, his ability to close his eyes without remembering how it felt to climb over the dead in foxholes with bullets clenched between his teeth.

The government isn’t going to give him reparations—no GI Bill or pension for a man of the 442nd—but it wouldn’t have been enough to even the costs anyway. He says as much to Matt, knocking back cheap beer that tastes like hops and forgetting. Matt’s going back to school in a few weeks, using his new GI to get the engineering degree he always wanted. But Shiro’s not waiting around on the kind of Norman Rockefeller life that all his buddies who made it back are aiming for, which is good, because he’s not going to get it.

Matt leans back in the booth and puts his beer down. Under the grimy lights of the bar, his shrapnel scar comes in sharp relief. He’d gotten it back when the Texas Battalion got pinned in the Vosges and they had to bomb in supplies. Shiro’d pulled him out while the wound was still scabbing over. “What’re you going to do, then?” he asks now.

“I’ve got enough money for a motorcycle,” Shiro says. He presses his thumb against the sweating side of the glass and thinks of the open road. Part of him figures if he leaves, then it’ll feel more like a choice and less like he’s got nothing to come back to.

“So you’re just going to take off?” It’s clear that Matt’s trying not to sound judgmental. Got worry lines between his eyebrows that underscore just how hard he’s trying. Same look he got when Shiro treated his own wounds in the Vosges, like he couldn’t understand that it’d be hell to get the white doctors to treat him, because Matt’s got a family and a future, and…

Phantom pain spikes along the empty space where Shiro’s arm used to be. He imagines clenching that hand into a fist and slamming it into someone’s face. Not Matt’s face. Just. Someone’s.

They never said how hard it would be to leave the war behind and he hates that he’s the only one who seems to feel that way.

“Yeah,” he finally says. Too gruff, he knows, but it takes a lot to get that much out. But he owes this to Matt, who’s been his friend through the kind of hell that breaks lesser men. “Head east. Thought I might swing through Arizona. See…”

“Oh.” Quiet settles between them even as the general noise of the bar picks up. Matt fidgets, eyes locked on some middle distance. He clenches his jaw once, twice, then lets out a long breath. “I’m sorry. I understand.” Of course he doesn’t. But he’s trying, and that counts for enough. “When are you leaving?”

Lifting his eyes, Shiro makes eye contact and lets his mouth kick into a half smile. “Tomorrow.”

They drink to that. It’s a good way to spend his last night in the city and he’s glad now that he didn’t leave without saying goodbye. Part of him even figures maybe he shouldn’t leave. There’s work in the city, and friends, and probably even a future if he’s willing to wait around for it.

Next morning, he leaves anyway. Straps his ruck—military issue, the only good thing the government ever gave him—to the back of his motorcycle, kicks up the throttle, and takes off into the rising sun.

It takes him weeks to make the journey to where he’s going. All memory and no maps, carrying him over state lines. Shiro remembers the barbed wire, the desert sun, the watchtowers with armed guards. In a small town in Arizona, a stone’s throw from a reservation, there’s a ghost town that used to be an internment camp. It’s where the war started, and he thinks maybe it can be where the war ends. If he’s lucky.

Someone like him should’ve remembered that he’s got survivor’s luck. The kind that keeps him just this side of alive but not much else.

He parks his motorcycle in the shade of the camp’s entrance and walks along the high fences. Squints against the desert sun at the abandoned watchtowers. Thinks of how when they left they stripped down the barbed wire because it could be useful again. Instead of finding peace, he finds a witch.

Or maybe a witch finds him.

“You were one of the soldiers,” she says. Her voice is a broken thing, rasping at the edges, but there’s strength in it. Despite the heat, she wears a heavy cloak that obscures all but her glowing yellow eyes and a spill of bone white hair. “A soldier in the war on the other side of the world.”

“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t think he has a reason to lie, then, and later he’ll wonder what would have happened if he had.

“How much it cost you.” The way she croons the words sends unease skittering down his spine. He stands his ground more from habit than anything. Somehow she must sense it, that instinct telling him to move away, because she laughs. Witches like to offer deals, and she wastes no time with hers: “I can give you an arm, my brave soldier boy, in exchange for a promise.”

The last time he didn’t read the fine print, he lost almost everything. It should make him wary. Should, but doesn’t. He flexes his fingers into fists—into a fist, singular—and imagines what it would be like to be physically whole again. “What kind of promise?” he asks.

More laughter, yipping like a coyote, and her glee makes his bones ache. “Nothing too terrible,” she says. “Only that one day, when you give your heart away, you’ll become my Champion.”

Shiro thinks he can remember stories like this. Magic cannot lie, and so neither can witches. That does not make them kind or good. “Your Champion?” he asks. Even as his mouth shapes the words he feels the power in them, the weight, the cost. Whatever she asks of him may not be terrible, but it is no small thing.

“My Champion,” she agrees. For a moment she is quiet, so all sound is the rustle of wind between fence posts. Still, witches cannot lie. “I will own you body and soul. You will fight for me and be my greatest weapon.”

Agreement rests in the back of his throat. Stinging and hot, like his eyes when he’s driven too long into the sun, and he has to bite it back. He wants to say yes because he’s been a soldier and he’s been a weapon. He wants to say yes because he’s becoming certain those may be all he ever is again. He wants to say yes because he’s lost almost everything. All of that must be why she wants him, why she found him, why she chose him.

“If I don’t give my heart away?” he asks.

The witch does not laugh. Somehow the absence is more eerie than the presence might have been. “You will,” she says. “Humans always do.”

“If I don’t,” he presses.

Consideringly, she tilts her head. As though he’s surprised her. Shiro knows he can’t be the first to ask this question, when offered this bargain, but maybe he’s the first who’s meant it. “Then you will live your life. You will keep the arm. You will die alone.” Nothing of her features show beneath the heavy shadows of the cloak, but he gets the impression of teeth bared into an imitation of a smile. “And I will find another Champion.”

Shiro loses almost everything, and so he decides to gamble with his soul to get a little of it back.

**Author's Note:**

> if you too are a dumb history heaux who loves dark fairytales come yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/akaiikowrites).


End file.
